Posts Tagged ‘democracy’

The always-interesting Peter Hitchens makes a point that we have made on this blog many times: the voters are ultimately to blame. Humans in groups indulge in herd behavior, where social factors become more important than the goal at hand, and so even in groups of smart people, voters settle on whatever compromise offends the least number of people. This means that they are selecting an illusion, and after the election, they can blame each other or the politicians. There is no responsibility or accountability in democracy.

Q: Peter, now you’re not known for your love of politicians. Would you bang them up …

P: No, apart from the practical unworkability of it: a selective victor’s justice which would follow, with the losing opposition being prosecuted by the government while people still remember what had been said, and all other kinds of impracticability such as that.

It’s ridiculous for us to pretend that the politicians are the only ones involved in dishonesty at elections.

In the old Soviet Union it used to be said that people pretended to work and the government pretended to pay them. The work was phony, the money was phony.

In our elections the politicians pretend to have lots of money spent on us. We pretend to believe them. And it’s by pretending to believe them repeatedly that we’ve got into the mess we have.

We’re just as complicit in it as they are. We’re far too willing to believe the blatant lies that were being told by people who are bribing us with our own money, and one of the reasons why democracy is going so rapidly down the plumbing is precisely because of that.

So to turn on the politicians and blame them for playing this game which we play with absolutely the same enthusiasm is ridiculous.

Q: We can’t blame the public . . .

P: Yes, you can blame the public.

Q: If they’re all lying . . .

P: It’s time we blame the public because the public’s self-deception is one of the reasons this country is so heavily in debt, both nationally and individually.

We will not face up to the realities of the situation. We would much rather be lied to than told the truth.

If any politician went into an election and said, “This is the real state of the economy: we’re bankrupt, we don’t make or export anything worth having, and we’re going to have to increase income tax or other kinds of taxes very heavily simply to balance the national books,” they’d lose the election.

In the same way, egalitarianism — the philosophy of human equality — removes the need for people to do good or right. If everyone is accepted equally, and given rights just for being human, the bad is equal to the good, and so people have no incentive to keep doing good, much as in socialism they have no incentive to be productive or conscientious in their work because the outcomes are roughly the same with each choice. This resembles the condition known as “heat death,” where particles stop moving because every option is approximately similar in result.

Whether in mainstream politics or the Alt Right, it is taboo to mention this failure of the electorate because if we do, we must accept that we must change from within. We would prefer to simply apply rules to ourselves so that we can control ourselves through manipulation because that requires the least amount of space in our minds, and allows us to continue to be fixated on ourselves and our desires, judgments, feelings, emotions and sensations. When change from within is required, we need to re-organize ourselves to adapt to our reality, which means that we could possibly be wrong, and this incites a fear of Darwinian consequences in us, so we create a superstition called equality which banishes that fear.

As long as there is voting, there will be decisions where people are not invested in doing good or right, but in getting along with the group or getting what they as individuals want out of it. The group, which appears to be a mindless collective, is in fact a mindless collective of individuals who have decided that they want to avoid responsibility for the consequences of their actions. Its mindless nature is created by the evasion of individuals, who are in the grip of something approximating hubris or individualism which makes them decide that their own needs are more important than those of organic civilization, the patterns of nature, moral good and cultural values.

The Alt Right has suggested that monarchies are better than current Western democracies. In an attempt to understand this in the real world as it is today, we can look at some statistics.

The Global Competitiveness Index (GCI) ranks more than a 100 countries on a scale depicting economic productiveness. What is interesting is the following group of countries:

Netherlands

Finland

Canada

Australia

Sweden

Denmark

Norway

They have been consistently ranked within the top twenty-two productive countries from 1999 to 2015. Viewed as a group, however, it can be said that there is a slight downward movement of their rankings over time, most likely due to the “two-speed world” where economic growth in emerging countries (like BRICS) are offset by stagnation in the erstwhile developed world.

However, there is another characteristic of these countries: they are monarchical in some form or other.

These monarchies have exerted tremendous influence on the rest of the world for a long time, where for them the economic imperative of growth or stagnation is not particularly interesting, because they are mainly interested in stability and not growth, which is like a treadmill in that when the economy comes to depend on it, it must constantly increase or the economy suffers. Monarchies are notorious for preferring stability, which also avoids the overpopulation, land overuse, and proliferation of cities that is common to growth-based economies.

They have made mistakes of course, but that doesn’t mean the alternative right is wrong with its assessment. The point is that monarchies have in some form or other been stable for a very long time. If anything, what these monarchies suffer from is paying too much attention to the will of the people, which always results in conjectural thinking.

The latest experiment implemented by the West is bringing democracy to the third world, which was rolled out after colonialism was systematically withdrawn. They do this because monarchs are now limited to enforcing democracy in their own nations because they are forced to coexist with this, and to fail to enforce it in the third world is a rejection of the notion that it is good.

Consider Nelson Mandela’s organization the African National Congress (ANC) which was classified as a terrorist organization by America at the same time it was funded by the European countries listed above. The people wanted equality; the monarchs did not want mass revolt and the horrors of the French Revolution or Bolshevik uprising in their countries, so they went along with it.

In the grips of democracy, these first world countries do not realize the productive decline they are suffering because they persist in supporting democracy, despite strong indicators that democracy in South Africa is literally failing by the numbers. Worse, they are doubling down like good SJWs by sponsoring the destruction of monarchies in Mandela-land.

The first world monarchies wants to destroy the concept of their own existence in the emerging world, while they themselves get destroyed back in the first world by the same democracy they are supporting. Where initially they sponsored terror, now they have become the terrorists aiming to destroy other monarchies. This is clearly not stable.

While we may be critical of colonialism in practical terms, our real assault on it comes from democratic notions of the equality of all people and therefore, a need to dedicate ourselves to questing for egalitarianism everywhere. This eliminates self-interest by the first world while encouraging the third world to assert its self-interest at our expense.

This shows us that monarchism and democracy cannot coexist. Democracy forms a mentally addictive pathology that then drives our countries to destroy ourselves at the same time they destroy third world monarchies in the same nations where democracy is entering its death-phase. Democracy has become our obsession, and it is working for neither first nor third world nations.

One way forward would be to do what every scenario planner has refused to do since 1992: implement a monarchy in South Africa. They fear this because traditionalism is viewed as anti-“reform,” but the Alt Right’s view is that the opposite is true. Reform has been proven to lower competitiveness down where traditional societies have been proven as stable.

Perhaps we are, like most groups of people afraid for the future, relying on what seemed to work in the past as crutches. Democracy seemed to win the world wars, and growth-based economies provide the way of life that seemed to make our people happy. As its instability threatens both third and first worlds, however, it makes sense to consider monarchy and stability instead of growth and democracy.

Their key concept is the idea of consolidation, which refers to democracy being accepted as the only legitimate form of government. As written in the seminal article on the topic, consolidated democracies are those where democratic methods have a monopoly on politics:

First, in a modern polity, free and authoritative elections cannot be held, winners cannot exercise the monopoly of legitimate force, and citizens cannot effectively have their rights protected by a rule of law unless a state exists.

…In sum, when we talk about the consolidation of democracy, we are not dealing with liberalized nondemocratic regimes, or with pseudo-democracies, or with hybrid democracies where some democratic institutions coexist with nondemocratic institutions outside the control of the democratic state.

…Essentially, by a “consolidated democracy” we mean a political regime in which democracy as a complex system of institutions, rules, and patterned incentives and disincentives has become, in a phrase, “the only game in town.”

A consolidated democracy is one where all of the institutions in that society function according to democratic principles, all politics are conducted through democratic methods, and democracy has “legitimacy” in that it is seen as the only acceptable system of government. The instant that other methods are introduced, democracy loses its consolidation, or monopoly over political methods.

In “The Danger of Deconsolidation,” this definition of consolidation is expanded:

In our view, the degree to which a democracy is consolidated depends on three key characteristics: the degree of popular support for democracy as a system of government; the degree to which antisystem parties and movements are weak or nonexistent; and the degree to which the democratic rules are accepted. (15)

In other words, if any of these three change — faith in democracy, broad acceptance of alternatives, or rejection of democratic rules — the democracy is unstable and prone to being replaced. This provides a framework for replacement of democracy:

Subvert faith in democracy

Build an alternative party

Reject democratic rules

Movements such as the (European) New Right and the Alt Right have tackled the first and third by creating a cultural wave against democratic thinking and the vanguard of democracy, civil rights. Civil Rights, which inherently involves multiculturalism per its history, is the most extreme form of egalitarianism yet found, and also an existential threat to the cultures ruled by democracy, which means that acceptance of it means these conquered people are open to all forms of egalitarianism.

Foa and Mounk start out by pointing out the elephant in the room: people are dissatisfied with democracy. Only 13% of Americans believe in their elected representatives, and in Europe, discontent is rising as well. This creates a situation where people are psychologically open to alternatives to democracy.

What is interesting about this is that, much like in the forces that propelled the election of Donald Trump, the anti-democratic sentiment is strongest among those who are more affluent because they are the ones being taxed to pay for the lower-income strata of their society. They are no longer defending democratic institutions, but want a competent leader to evade them:

One reason for these changes is that whereas two decades ago affluent citizens were much more likely than people of lower income groups to defend democratic institutions, the wealthy are now moderately more likely than others to favor a strong leader who can ignore democratic institutions (see Figure 4 below). (13)

Now, if we are reading between the lines in this article, we see what is happening here: democracy is deconsolidating. Those who know best, meaning the higher earners who run their own businesses or departments or professional practices, no longer have faith in democratic methods or democracy, following the subversion path outlined by the Alt Right.

At the same time, those of relatively lower income are more likely to support democracy because they are the recipients of benefits, and therefore are afraid of losing what is being given to them, at least without a corresponding reduction in their costs, taxes or obligations. The Alt Right can win here not by supporting more social programs, but by supporting a radical tax reduction for the lower middle class. If it does not do this, it will strengthen confidence in democracy, and thus undo the Alt Right idea of hierarchy replacing equality.

Democracies survive when they have both wealth and consolidation. If either of those changes, the democracy will become ripe to fall:

Democracies that are both wealthy and consolidated, however, appear to be safe: As Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi have shown, no consolidated democracy with a GDP per capita of over $6,000 in 1985 international prices has ever collapsed. (14)

In the modern West, we are primed to lose both of these things. First, our economy is ripe for downfall because of the past twenty years of dot-com wealth evaporating; next, as “The Danger of Deconsolidation” tells us, it is already partially deconsolidating as people lose faith in leaders like Angela Merkel and Theresa May.

Looking back over the past thirty years, we see that when Soviet Communism fell, so did the only force that both restrained democracy and made citizens of democracies afraid of “The Other Side.” Communism was a threat not because it was obvious that it would fall, but that if it worked for a century or more, it would be serious competition for the Leftward slide of the West that also included capitalism in the trend following the French Revolution.

One way to see this is through rich-country, poor-country responses. In the wealthy West, it made sense to simply “graft on” socialism lite by installing welfare systems, civil rights and social benefits; in the less wealthy countries, there was a need for immediate aid, and so the only solution was military-style mobilization of the economy toward wealth redistribution.

Neither has worked, as it turns out. The Communist model collapsed on itself, but the Western model has run into trouble because those socialist lite programs proved as entrenched as Communism. In addition, they have failed to budge poverty, and may have increased it, while what made poverty less horrifying was greater efficiency through capitalist economies of scale.

Much worse, these programs in both US/EU have contributed to miserable bureaucratic societies where people have ceased reproducing at replacement rates. That is a sign that people have no faith in their future and find their present existence joyless; this corresponds to a rise in hobbies, drug use and fetishes as a way of distracting ourselves from the existential void described by T.S. Eliot in his poem “The Hollow Men.”

It has taken some time to see that the path on which we embarked in the 1930s has led to grotesque failure. Government changes normally require a century or so to shake out, which is why the Soviets collapsed at seventy years with a truly unworkable system but the capitalist-socialist hybrid in the West is still sort of holding on as it approaches the century mark.

However, during this time the citizens of the West have seen their government go down the same path as the French Revolutionaries and Soviet Union: controlling, destructive, and consistently treating its citizens as expendable means to its own ideological objectives. Not surprisingly, democracy is deconsolidating from the ground up.

Any time you are in a situation where obvious problems appear, and everyone in authority either shrugs them off or seems incapable of understanding them, you know that you are in a dying organization.

This can happen at a job. Many of us have ended up working for companies that were months or a few years away from bankruptcy. The one thing that the “corporate culture” (LOL) had in common between them was denial. That is, people found it mentally more convenient and easier to chase after non-problems than face the one big problem, which is that the business pattern of the company was broken.

And so there is endless neurotic chatter about getting time sheets in, keeping track of minor expenses, cracking down on office supply theft, turning up the air conditioning after work, and other cost-cutting measures that while not terrible in themselves, missed the big point that the business needed to bring in more money or lose a large number of its people.

Now imagine this on the level of a nation. Even some of our more successful business leaders are noticing the decline:

We are unable to build bridges, we’re unable to build airports, our inner city school kids are not graduating…we have become one of the most bureaucratic, confusing, litigious societies on the planet.

If that sounds like democracy in action, think about this: the United States has spent the past thirty years in a stupor of civil rights obsession and has missed out on many necessary changes, while having passed a whole lot of laws.

Democracies always go out this way. Voters crave the possibility of never losing more than the potentiality of winning. Fear is greater than aspiration, with most people. And so the herd approves tens of thousands of little band-aid laws.

The problem is that when you add all of those up, and the regulatory agencies that apply them and the interpret them in thousand-page documents, and the court cases and expert recommendations about them, you have a nation tied down with red tape and fears.

Democracy always goes out this way, and caste revolt always creates democracy. When you are a prole who wishes to be king, your only strategy is to claim that you are equal to the king, which legitimizes overthrowing him and implementing prole rule. But how do “equals” rule? Only through a lengthy process in which everyone is involved, even if the end result is more of a dice roll than decisive leadership.

Caste revolt requires the removal of all healthy, normal and fulfilling behavior so that people are empty and thus are driven to cling to the ideology of caste revolt, egalitarianism.

Not surprisingly, this makes them existentially miserable and they stop breeding beginning with the smartest. We are seeing this now because American happiness in decline:

“America’s crisis is, in short, a social crisis, not an economic crisis,”economist and Columbia University professor Jeffrey D. Sach wrote in a chapter of the report called “Restoring American Happiness.”

Sachs mentions that while per capita GDP — an indicator used to gauge the economic health of a country — is rising, happiness is falling.

“The United States can and should raise happiness by addressing America’s multi-faceted social crisis—rising inequality, corruption, isolation, and distrust—rather than focusing exclusively or even mainly on economic growth, especially since the concrete proposals along these lines would exacerbate rather than ameliorate the deepening social crisis,” he wrot

How can anyone be happy here? First, incompetence and disorder reign; second, we can have no faith in a society without purpose because it is ruled by lower castes for whom “equality” is more important than “good,” “correct” or “accurate.”

Think about it: we are in the grips of a mental virus, an ideology which people fear to say “no” to, that has replaced our real-world goals with an ideological goal. Everything we do is to achieve reality. We have forgotten reality in the process.

We can make this civilization happy again but it requires removing equality as our goal or our method, since as a method it quickly becomes a goal, and replacing it with the idea of virtue. We need a society dedicated to good.

That is not the same as a society dedicated to happiness. The secret is that if we do good, we will improve ourselves, and in so doing, will find purpose and become happy. But the politicians and voters will never tell you that.

Matt Tabibi is like an inverted compass: whatever he does, go one hundred and eighty degrees the other way. Here he is with the newest scapegoat of the Left:

The bank’s unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumer credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you’re losing, it’s going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it’s going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.

The ideal political virus is one which convinces people that their misfortunes are not their fault, especially if they are, and then gives them both a false cause to blame for their misfortune and a false goal to pursue instead of fixing the actual problem. The best goal is one that, if achieved, will change nothing, and the best group to bash is one that will never go away, so that you always have a bogeyman to blame.

Since there will always be someone with more than others, the Rich™ are an ideal target. You can blame the rich for your problems even to the point where everyone in society owns only one bean, because some guy will have a bean that looks bigger than what others have. And if your average person has no understanding of what these rich people do to make their money, even better.

The rising consumer credit rates are caused by the market reacting to risk.

The half-eaten pension funds are caused by the federal government, states and cities implementing programs that the voters approved of without wondering where the money was coming from, or from those same governments take money from those programs to pay for other benefits.

Mass layoffs arise when businesses fail, which usually happens in response to higher costs caused by programs that We The People voted for.

And future taxes? Taxes have been going up steadily because people are continuing to vote for more expensive benefits programs.

Did Goldman-Sachs profit from these events? Yes, as did many other businesses, because they saw the voters coming. They knew the stupid saps cannot stop themselves for voting for free stuff, especially for the poor or minorities, so since someone will make money on that… might as well be us.

And then, we should consider our media. They make their money by convincing us that what we want to believe is true is in fact true. That is not a conspiracy theory; it is their business model, and it has always been this way, but until recently, some sense of professional ethics prevailed some of the time.

Now that we have peeled back the layers, what we see is modern society laid bare. The voters are all conning each other by voting for free stuff using other people’s money; the politicians are accepting the cluelessness of the voters, and selectively reminding them of the costs of their visions. The press then casts blame elsewhere so the voters feel comfortable being foolish.

This is how civilizations degenerate. People gradually become more insane, neurotic and schizophrenic as human reality detaches from natural reality. The human herd, by using its symbols and images, convinces itself that it is God, and makes decisions which are correspondingly insane, and then scapegoats anyone it can as things get consistently worse year after year.

Those on the right who are not fascinated by having an emotional reaction to perceived injustices, but instead are asking about the future of civilization, realize that we do not have to fight liberal democracy. It has ended itself, and everyone in power knows this, which is why they are stealing whatever they can carry and headed for rich people enclaves buried in peaceful parts of the third world.

For most people, this future seems remote. Our technology works — sort of — and seems to banish nature away, so we humans can do whatever we want. But the truth is that nature is more like mathematics, an inherent order to how events turn out in reality, and so it is within us and rules whatever we do, and if we deny this order, our actions simply end in comical disaster.

Amerika might be seen as a conditional doomsayer: our articles point out that ideas have consequences in that actions based on those ideas lead to predictable conclusions. When we as a species make bad choices, we can expect doom. That doom has demographic, racial, cultural, economic, military, environmental and survival implications:

A recent article in New Scientist…argues that decreasing fertility rates are indicative of the world’s population slowly imploding rather than exponentially rising — a trend that will continue until we reach some form of crisis point. As it stands, half of the world’s countries have fallen below the replacement rate for developed nations (which is, on average, 2 children per woman). If this trend continues on, countries like Germany and Italy will see their populations decrease by half over the next 60 years.

This is not the first time Elon Musk has discussed overpopulation: in March he warned that we face a “demographic implosion,” because in many countries “you have a very high dependency ratio, where the number of people who are retired is very high relative to the number of people who are net producers.”

Musk raises the point that we are facing dual crises: the producers are declining, while the dependents are increasing.

This follows the path of every egalitarian society every attempted. Technically, equality cannot be implemented because those who are less successful are limited by biology; they cannot be made smarter, healthier, wiser or more noble. Therefore, the only method of implementing equality is to penalize the successful by removing some of their wealth and power, and giving it to the masses.

In turn, that creates a perverse incentive structure and dark organization. Those who are naturally adept are penalized, but those who are incompetent are subsidize, so the adept stop engaging in the system. Eventually, they drop out and have difficulty finding mates. As the incompetents take over, daily life becomes insane, and so the adept stop reproducing entirely because, being competent, they recognize that in an insane world, their offspring have no future. Equality means that the incompetents take over and the competent are killed off.

Where do we see this pattern all the time? In the third world, those who attempt to do more than the average are often seen as witch doctors or cheaters and beaten down. As a result, natural selection kicks in that selects against competence, and soon you have a society of self-focused, incompetent people who not surprisingly, make horrible decisions regarding government and culture, leading to a non-civilization in civilization form.

The incompetence of liberal democracy has become visible because of the sheer stupidity of human decision-making over the past 228 years. This leads to a series of simultaneous crises working together to doom us, meaning that we will experience — much as with the rise in incompetents and loss of competent people — a simultaneous intensified need at the same time our options are limited. A good partial list:

4. The area of land available for food production, and the remaining land’s productivity, is decreasing due to:

Soil lost to erosion;

Fertility lost following declining levels of plant nutrients and soil carbon;

Soil productivity is being destroyed by salinisation due to the build-up of natural salts from irrigation water and reclaimed sewage water;

Land is being taken out of production for the construction of housing and roads, etc.

Productivity in a number of areas is declining because of declining rainfall (with climate change), in some areas previously productive land is turning to desert;

Coastal land is being lost due to rising sea levels, this is particularly important in the world’s great river deltas (which have some of the world’s most fertile land);

Land-use is being changed from food production to fuel production.

…6. Fresh water resources are greatly over-committed, and in many areas are declining due to climate change. Water is being drawn from many of the world’s major aquifers at rates much greater than they are being recharged by natural processes; many are failing or will begin failing in the near future. Much of the world’s food production depends on irrigation, but the water available for irrigation is decreasing.

7. Humanity is approaching the ‘photosynthetic ceiling’. Soon there will be little photosynthetic capacity on earth that is not dedicated to man’s direct use.

…8. A huge range of chemicals are being released into natural environments with unknown long-term effects.

…9. Plastic wastes are being released into natural environments with unknown long-term effects. It has been forecast that by 2050, 95% of seabirds will have plastic in their gut.

…18. Phosphate supplies for the production of fertiliser are running out. Phosphorus is one of the three most important plant nutrients; without phosphorus fertilisers the “Green Revolution” in agriculture would not have been possible.

…21. Pollinating insects are in decline. Honeybees, in particular, are suffering badly in many countries from colony collapse disorder.

…22. Man is now artificially producing more nitrates (as fertilisers) than are produced naturally, with the result that the natural nitrogen cycle has become unbalanced. Nitrates and phosphate being washed off farmland and from sewage are causing algal blooms and consequent ‘dead zones’ in the coastal waters of many parts of the world.

This list, taken from an excellent list which unfortunately contains Leftist non-issues alongside real issues, shows the tip of the iceberg. We are living out of balance not just with nature, but with logic; we are seeing that nature, shaped by aeons of evolution, is more logical than we are.

If you had asked an aristocrat back in 1788 what would happen if the masses took over leadership, he or she would probably have said that the proles would not recognize the difference between want and need, and would therefore consume everything recklessly, forgetting that there is a cause behind every effect, and that the cause of our success is our environment and our living in balance within natural order.

The prole holiday has wrecked the planet and set into motion forces it cannot control. These will not end catastrophically, but through a steady increase in the cost of everything good — real food, clean air, safe water — with those who have no money ending up with cancers and other degenerative diseases which will limit their lifespans.

In other words, the world will resemble Brazil: a few nice areas surrounded by unruly favelas who have to be fought with armed police and bought off with social welfare otherwise they will revolt, with the classic attribute of prole revolutions being that the revolutionaries seem unconcerned with the losses they take or the damage they do. These are gangster raids, not political evolutions.

However, the sources of wealth for the powerful will decrease. Consumer markets are less relevant when the proles can no longer afford gasoline or much in the way of consumer goods, and productivity itself will decline when the cheap resources that propel agriculture and industry are no longer easily available. Wealth will decline as well.

This means that in the future, business models like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Walmart and Costco will decline. With the end of the age of cheap consumer goods, the vast consumerist group that makes these businesses wealthy will decline, and margins will narrow in industry and agriculture as natural resources thin.

At the same time, we will have produced “exponential revolutions,” or those in which vast numbers of impoverished and purposeless people band together into giant gangs to take whatever wealth remains, including genetic wealth from smarter populations. This leads to a situation like the one described by Jean Raspail in Camp of the Saints, where the third world invades the first world:

In an interview with Il Messagero newspaper, Mr Tajani said there would be an exodus “of biblical proportions that would be impossible to stop if we don’t confront the problem now”.

…”When people lose hope, they risk crossing the Sahara and the Mediterranean because it is worse to stay at home, where they run enormous risks. If we don’t confront this soon, we will find ourselves with millions of people on our doorstep within five years.

“Today we are trying to solve a problem of a few thousand people, but we need to have a strategy for millions of people.”

His solution of investment in Africa is actually the wrong approach. At this point, the die is cast. There are too many people, and most of them would rather go to a nice new place than try to fix their homes, which means that the nice places will be destroyed just like the goose that laid golden eggs in the fables of yore.

This follows a pattern that is as old as liberalism: lower castes reproduce recklessly, then blame those above them for having failed to stop them, and this triggers a revolution which replaces the higher castes with lower ones, resulting in even worse decisions that amplify the original problems.

Now that this has happened in the West, we have people at the top who are so brain-locked on Leftism that they think immigration is healthy and viable. This is the same process that destroyed many classic civilizations across the world, including Angkor Wat, Greece, Aztecs, Maya and most likely many more. Societies die by caste revolt.

In other words, our colonization of the third world merely exported our own revolutions, and now those revolutions have come back to visit us, which is a consequence of the incompetence of our leaders and most people in our society, which was also brought on by our revolutions. As long as we remain in thrall to chasing the mythical god of Equality, we will self-destruct no matter what methods we try.

The proof of this can be found in the collapse conditions which we are now facing. Sure, climate change is nonsense, but what about pollution, overfishing, land overuse, erosion, and other signs of how we have thoroughly abused our world to the point that we are threatening our own future? Equality creates a tragedy of the commons by rewarding people simply for being human, which creates an incentive to arrive, absorb social benefits, and then take over the political apparatus so those benefits never end.

As Western democracies collapse from within in a fog of bad decisions, very few voices will point to the obvious culprit. They will blame the Rich,™ the Anglos, the Jews,™ the Christians, the atheists, the Leftists. They will not realize that it is our notion of equality that has killed us, and until we discard it, everything we do will fail while destroying us.

The modern age has ended in failure: constant racial violence, debt dooming government and consumers, environmental pollution and dying ecosystems, ugly cities, first world populations failing to reproduce, and a rise in anxiety and depression among the young:

When you examine certain other data, though, there’s an interesting recent wrinkle to this trajectory. In a paper published in 2014 in Social Indicators Research, Twenge tracked the results of the Monitoring the Future (MtF) survey, “a nationally representative sample of U.S. 12th graders [administered] every year since 1976,” between 1982 and 2013. Like the MMPI, the MtF asks students about symptoms in a manner that should be generally resistant to cultural change: The somatic items Twenge examined asked about trouble sleeping, remembering things, thinking/concentrating, and learning, as well as shortness of breath. An interesting recent pattern emerged on these measures:

All the items end up significantly higher than where they started, but for many of them most of the increase happens over the first half of the time period in question. From the late 1990s or so until 2013, many of the items bounce around a bit but ultimately remain flat, or flat-ish.

Why have these symptoms appeared to plateau? “It’s hard to prove causation in over-time schedules, said Twenge, “but SSRIs came on the market in the early 1990s, and that’s exactly when these things started to plateau.” These drugs — Prozac and Lexapro, among others — have been prescribed to millions of people who experience these symptoms, many of whom presumably saw some improvement once the drugs kicked in, so this explanation at least makes intuitive sense.

It is the secret in plain sight: despite their wealth and technology, modern people are miserable. This indicates a non-material origin of their sadness, which seems to occur because of a lack of faith in the future, a failure by society to meet their existential needs, and the absence of any particularly compelling purpose to life. When our only goals are to attend jobs, buy stuff and try to escape the ongoing decline, people just do not feel like doing much, including reproducing. It is a hell from which they are only too glad to exit in death.

This, more than anything else, is what has doomed the Age of Ideology, which started with The Renaissance™ when humans proclaimed that the human form was more important than hierarchy, organization, natural order, tradition and even logic. Civilization gave up on having a purpose and decided to focus on individuals instead.

That in turn required mass manipulation, which means that an ideology must be created and enforced, and people will be treated as a fungible commodity like electric power which drives the wheels of government. This decision, made in the name of individualism, in fact penalizes individuality, and leaves people stranded in a society that recognizes their external traits only and ignores who they are inside.

With this misery, people are ready to destroy what we have. They know that it is a path that leads to nothing but death, so there is really no risk in bailing out on it; it is not like we can find something more fatal than sure death. Maybe it will kill us sooner, but if we are miserable, that is not a really disturbing thought.

The end of the Age of Ideology brings about what some are calling “the return of history,” in a nod to Samuel Huntington and his formative book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, in which he suggested that external human organizations like ideology were dying and being replaced by organic groupings that could be instantly visually discerned, like religion, race, culture, ethnicity and tribe.

The return of history is a scary time. All that we have known is dying; while daily life will probably remain similar, what we view as good has changed, and so people find themselves desiring an entirely different type of society:

Are the norms underpinning the liberal democratic governments of North America and Western Europe as fragile as the communist ideology of Russia and Eastern Europe in the decades preceding its sudden collapse? That’s the implication of a provocative essay by the political scientists Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk in the latest issue of the Journal of Democracy using World Values Survey data to highlight the broad-based erosion in support for democratic institutions across the Western world.

…The dark specter of illiberalism across the West is symptomatic of a deep and broad-based decline in confidence in democratic institutions and ideas that has been taking place for two decades.

The decline has been longer than that. In 1789, liberal democracy began takeover of the West, and launched us into Napoleonic Wars, a series of revolutions, and finally, two catastrophic world wars. When the postwar order ended with the falling of the Soviet Union, people began to realize that this was the final condition of this path: existential emptiness, shopping, diversity, vapid public figures, dead culture, graffiti-scarred and ugly cities, divorce and promiscuity, and every other aspect of a failed culture on its way toward third world status.

We were told that social hierarchy — especially aristocrats — was the source of our misery, and that if we ruled ourselves, we would do better. That turns out to be a lie; democracy has caused more death and disaster than any other system of government, and it is destroying us from within as well. For this reason, people are backing away from ideology; they see it as a type of black magic because it always sounds good, and just as consistently produces horrible results.

“Democracy is always presented as if it were incomplete, because democracy is not enough by itself,” says Macron, elaborating that there is always something missing in the democratic process; some sort of void.

“In French politics, this absence is the presence of a King, a King whom, fundamentally, I don’t think the French people wanted dead,” said Macron. “The Revolution dug a deep emotional abyss, one that was imaginary and shared: the King is no more!” According to Macron, since the Revolution France has tried to fill this void, most notably with Napoleon and then Charles de Gaulle, which was only partially successful. “The rest of the time,” said Macron, “French democracy does not manage to fill this void.”

Democracy is artificial; aristocracy is natural, since human beings have different abilities and these place us in a hierarchy of capacity. Democracy is external, since we are forced to think about how our actions look instead of their results in reality, while aristocracy is internal because it is focused only on results, which apparently most people do not understand and fail to predict, as the results of democracy show.

The old West has died in a surge of mob rule and egotistic individualism as advocated in The Renaissance™ but arising far before when the middle class wanted the aristocracy out of the way so it could enjoy an unfettered business environment. We now see how that gamble ends, and we want off the crazy train to doom.

Two years after an international bailout that was supposed to lead to an economic revival, conditions here have only worsened and life for Greeks has become one of constant misery. The economy is stagnant, unemployment hovers around 25% and is twice as high for young adults, taxes are rising, and wages are falling. Half of Greek homeowners can’t make their mortgage payments and another quarter can’t afford their property taxes, according to the Bank of Greece.

So Greece is pretty much looking like a nation that went from The Cradle of Democracy to its pathetic abortion grave. After starting out as a nice, civilized, bureaucratic way to make non-conformists like Socrates drink the hemlock, Grecian democracy has upped its game. It has now spent the last two years serving its surviving population the economic equivalent of Jonestown Coolaid just to make sure they get every last bug.

Yet, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his left-wing Syriza Party ignored the referendum results and signed a third bailout deal that would provide nearly $100 billion in loans the country desperately needed to avoid collapse. Tsipras, whose party gained power on a pledge to resist further austerity requirements, reversed itself and adopted more budget and pension cuts. In June, he negotiated the latest payment of $9.7 billion.

You see Greece elected a formal and doctrinaire communist who has thus far demonstrated a capacity for leadership almost, but not quite as bountiful as a North Korean rice harvest. He could just about accidentally Holodomor a significant swath of his population. You probably wouldn’t like him if he were ever competent and professional enough to be deliberately malicious. Tsipras famously ran for office on three platforms.

3) He’d never knuckle under to Germany because the Nazis stole Greece’s gold and the Greeks still hadn’t received reparations.

There’s an old joke about a tourist who goes to Paris and asks about all the nice trees along the Champs Elysees. The natives explain that they are there as a service. They were planted so that German armies could march in the shade. A simple bumpkin could be forgiven for believing something similar with regards to the streets of Athens after Tsipras folded to Angela Merkel’s pet European Union and paid up his Danegeld like a nice little Marxian Poodle. German armies don’t march these days. Their financiers simply launch a blitzkrieg of foreclosures and credit downgrades.

But then again, Charles Darwin could only approve of how utterly the Greeks allowed themselves to be pwned without the firing of a single shot. We can cry about how rough it is to be cocaine addict and how we should all have sympathy. However, nobody stuck a gun to the dumb sonnovavitch’s head and made him buy the Bolivian Marching Powder. The Greeks believed they were actually getting money for free by discontinuing their national currency and adopting the Euro. They also may as well send a serious response to those Nigerian Prince emails that show up in the Spam Folder every other day. Those who believe in sodomizing the weak apparently need to pack their bags and go tour The Parthenon. The Greek People actually chose Alex Tsipras to represent their interests. I run very low on pity.

This is a hidden positive externality of the Democratic process. Just keep your passport handy. When a population freely chooses a man of Alex Tsipras’ philosophical beliefs, you know that you live among a den of thieves. When Alex Tsipras is The Prudent Man’s best choice out of a radioactively defective litter of candidates, you are a man amongst the ruins. Your nation is done — well past Medium Rare. Greece will get it’s Hitler. They deserve him just for being themselves. The only positive here is that he’ll be a Greek Hitler and not quite figure out how to get the trains to the death camps. Maybe he’ll watch The Great Dictator starring Charlie Chaplin rather than reading Mein Kampf. It’s about the only chance the Greeks have of staying out of Hell aside from a real-world German military intervention. It could be Repo Man on steroids.

According to a report that was produced by researchers at Harvard University, the number of Americans that spend more than 30 percent of their incomes on housing has more than doubled. In 2001, nearly 16 million Americans couldn’t afford the homes that they were currently living in, but by 2015 that figure had jumped to 38 million.

Cucks will whinge that the system is rigged. Like it fell out of the sky that way as Lucifer’s Hammer. Since nobody does whinging Cuck Twathurt with the elan of David Brooks, here we sample the fine whine.

It’s when we turn to the next task — excluding other people’s children from the same opportunities — that things become morally dicey. Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution recently published a book called “Dream Hoarders” detailing some of the structural ways the well educated rig the system. The most important is residential zoning restrictions. Well-educated people tend to live in places like Portland, New York and San Francisco that have housing and construction rules that keep the poor and less educated away from places with good schools and good job opportunities. These rules have a devastating effect on economic growth nationwide. Research by economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti suggests that zoning restrictions in the nation’s 220 top metro areas lowered aggregate U.S. growth by more than 50 percent from 1964 to 2009. The restrictions also have a crucial role in widening inequality.

Find me a sentence that Alex Tsipras wouldn’t nod along with in ideological synonymity. That’s your “conservative” New York Times columnist. The lefties couldn’t be reached. They were out back building a guillotine out of Legos and Lincoln Logs. Our elite smart guys would take us exactly where the Greek versions of Bernie, Hillary and Cherokee Liz have taken the miserable, suffering, bankrupt Athenians. The American People were still uncucked enough to offer the timerous and tenuous resistance of electing Donald Trump.

So now we have Trump instead, who tells people to punch counterprotesters instead of picking up their trash. When politeness and orderliness are met with contempt and betrayal, do not be surprised if the response is something less polite, and less orderly. Brooks closes his Trump column with Psalm 73, but a more appropriate verse is Hosea 8:7 “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” Trump’s ascendance is a symptom of a colossal failure among America’s political leaders, of which Brooks’ mean-spirited insularity is only a tiny part. God help us all.

So maybe God will help us. If he does, it will be for the nonce. The long-term trend will not travel on an upward monotonic azimuth. There’s a slow train coming and it’s not going to take the US of A to a very happy place. Our nation’s electorate has started voting itself free beer. That only ends in tears. It only ends like Greece. It ultimately only ends the way it did in Weimar Germany. A democracy becomes a contest of who/whom, and then it is doomed to dissolve into modern terror, inevitably some form of creeping socialist terror worthy of a Lovecraft novel.

What is great about this is that it shows democracy as usual. There is nothing exceptional here; democracy always goes this way. Even if you have a group of high-caste Western European males as founders, over time democracy does what it does best, which is to break down civilizations into individuals acting in self-interest against eternal things like heritage, culture, values and beliefs.

Take even a thoroughly Nordic group of high IQ, introduce democracy, and within a couple centuries you will have the same result. First they will allow caste-mixing, and then they will import related groups. Then they will import unrelated groups. Soon you will have a picture like the “after” (or post mortem) picture.

If you took the second group, 241 years later, and had them all interbreed, you would end up with an ethnic group much like today’s Ashkenazi Jews. One reason for the fanatical anti-Semitism of the far-Right is that subconsciously, people recognize that as our future: Western Europeans, having kids with Asian women, and those breeding with other groups, producing a Middle Eastern type.

This just democracy as it happens every time. Whenever a civilization reaches a stage where it has grown weak in the face of its troubles, its leaders advance democracy as a way of preventing lower caste revolt, but it backfires because democracy ensures that the lowest common denominator dominates. Soon there are no more exceptional people, only a rabid mass living in third world conditions.

In the future, democracy and equality will be classified as parasitic organisms because they are irresistible to humans, who promptly become zombies who then self-destruct as they chase imaginary visions of plenty.

All civilizations die by class revolt. The lower castes, who are more numerous, do not understand what the higher castes do for them, much as the average office worker has no idea why the CEO is the most valuable person in the building. The lower castes also reproduce at a higher rate. Soon there are a whole lot of followers, and very few leaders, and so at the first sign of trouble, the lower castes seize power.

They are aided by the mercantile middle classes, who realize that if civilization stops investing in the extensive rituals and behavior codes needed to maintain order, further business opportunities open up. The best allies of the raging prole herd are the graphic artists, lawyers, builders, shopkeepers, doctors, bankers, schoolteachers and plumbers.

As soon as democracy is adopted, the slide has begun because the feast has begun. All of that wealth and power spent keeping society functional is now redirected for redistribution to the citizens, who either take it for granted or more likely, simply do not care if it is there for future generations. The benefits flow!

We The People votes with its hearts and egos, and so any sane opinions are overwhelmed by the masses of votes coming in for whatever is stupid, short-sighted and pretentious. Most of them, since they have too little to be taxed, simply enjoy acting as if they have the money that they are ordering to be spent through the policies which they enact with their votes.

At this point, the currency begins losing value on a permanent basis. Whatever X monetary units purchased last decade now requires X+1 or Xx2 monetary units. The reason for this value loss is that wealth is being bled out of business and private citizens, funneled into government, and then dumped on other citizens as benefits, reducing its value by creating a new higher “bottom line” to which all higher amounts are relative.

[A]lthough the recession hurt the economy a lot, it happened to coincide with two trends that were slowly eroding the U.S.’s fundamentals…Those two trends are slowing productivity and reduced labor-force participation.

…As for labor-force participation, this has been falling since the turn of the century, though the last two years have seen a small uptick…

…But neither of these effects explains the 2000s, when these negative trends were getting started despite a healthy economy. The years before the recession also saw other disturbing developments. For example, the rate of high-growth startup formation fell during that period.

…Taken together, this evidence hints that some sort of long-term rot is afflicting the U.S. economy. What could it be? One candidate is the increase in industrial concentration — greater monopoly power might be holding back productivity and reducing employment. Other hypotheses abound — creeping regulation, a slowdown in scientific progress, Chinese competition, or the ephemeral nature of the internet economy. Some have even blamed video games for luring young men out of the labor force.

What could it be? Hint: the more you make your society into a dystopian wasteland of existential misery, the more the competent people drop out and leave the field to the incompetents. Therein you find your declining innovation and lowered workforce participation.

The voters will never realize that every dollar they put into social programs is a dollar subtracted from the business economy, which makes that weaker. They will never recognize this because their philosophy is to treat civilization and its productivity as givens, blank checks and full accounts upon which the voters may draw.

Every regulation they pass, and every law which protects “rights” against the big bad companies, incurs costs which siphon money from the economy. Every form they require someone to fill out means that money is going to bureaucrats and lawyers, but not back into earning more money. Every bit of red tape they implement convinces someone to quit and go live out of his van in the Badlands.

This is how democracy kills societies. It is a parasitic organism that steadily draws more and more of the wealth of the nation away, leaving behind carbon copies of itself through bureaucracy. Like any good salesman or con man, it lures the voters in by promising them that what they want to believe is true, is actually true, and gratefully they vote for more parasitism. Every time.

It is excruciating to watch for anyone who knows better, but luckily those are always at most 5% of the population who are not egomaniacs. The rest are too busy braggarting around about how important they are with their job titles, new cars, fancy clothes and big homes. Even — or especially — the “educated” ones.

Eventually democracy runs out of easy prey and turns on the core of the civilization, its middle class. It does this by raising costs on vital things like homes, whose value has been kicked up by high demand to escape the growing underclasses and high costs of regulations and lawsuits. This causes people to stop breeding:

Why is this shift to an increasingly child-free population occurring more in Southern California than elsewhere? One logical source may be housing prices, particularly near the coast, which present a particular problem for middle-class, middle-aged families. In contrast, the growth in the number of children under 17 is much higher in more affordable metropolitan areas such as Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, Phoenix, San Antonio, and Charlotte and Raleigh in North Carolina.

The same thing is happening in Europe. Faced with high costs, moronic and boring jobs, and governments who will clearly only make everything worse, the smartest people bail out and stop reproducing. Some escape to the countryside, or run off to the third world for most of their lives and return for the generous retirement benefits, but most simply cut out the biggest expense in their lives, children. The egomania of democracy encourages them in this decision, and so they consider themselves wise for having elected for intergenerational suicide.

In order to keep its promises to voters, democratic government tends to import foreigners as a workforce to replace the disappearing natives. They also like the fact that these voters are even more prone to vote, as Venezuelans did recently, for more generous benefits especially when the nation has no money. The parasites feast while the people starve by their own hand.

And when all is said and done, there will be nothing to write but, “Democracy killed another place.” People are so desperate to believe in their own equality that they insist others behave as if it were so, leading to unstable political systems that suck out the innards of society and then abandon the husk to be another shattered, mixed-race third world nightmare.